Metrics are very important to the operation of a business. Businesses use metrics to plan future expansion, assess customer interest in products, receive feedback about areas for improvement, and so forth. Metrics may include sales information (e.g., for specifics products and specific locations), customer opinions, product volume, inventory, and so on. Traditional brick and mortar businesses collect metrics through their own unique processes depending on how they track sales. For example, some accounting systems provide metrics, while some businesses may dedicate whole departments to gathering and tracking metrics-related information. Online businesses, such as e-commerce websites, benefit from an inherent collection of metrics. Because their visitors and sales occur electronically, a good trail of the consumer's behavior and actions is available.
Secret shoppers are hired by many stores with physical locations to test the customer experience at those locations. A secret shopper is a survey respondent paid to go to a store, shop there, and report to the company or a third party about various aspects of the shopping experience. Stores may test how locations are treating customers, how locations are complying with regulations, whether particular rare conditions (e.g., a peanut allergy at a restaurant) were handled appropriately by staff, and so on. Secret shoppers are very useful for location-specific analysis, but they may fail to capture the experience of every customer and customer type, and the process misses the types of places (typically online) where customers of a business share opinions today.
A recent study indicates that consumer brands with brick and mortar locations missed more than 70% of local customer feedback. This “local blind spot” is the direct result of the exploding consumer adoption of mobile, social, and location-based services. Many brands using leading social media and brand monitoring solutions do not realize they have this blind spot. The study found that keyword-based social media monitoring solutions, while an important piece of an overall strategy, failed to comprehensively surface in-store consumer content. For instance, keyword-based monitoring for Costco missed 63% of local consumer feedback at their warehouses. The root cause of the blind spot is that most solutions in the market today are designed for broad monitoring across the Internet, using keyword and key phrase matching. In addition, Internet-wide monitoring is not particularly good at sorting out specific information related to individual locations of a multi-location business.